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If you choose the side of the discard pile holder that says "A thought for those who died on the first expedition", you get a locked 1/1 pray action that you can take whenever a grave is visible on your terrain card, which says (on success): "Each involved character any discard any number of cards with the keyword will from their hand and/or inventory. For each card discarded this way, randomly take 2 cards from the Discard Pile and shuffle them back into the Action Deck."

My question is: are the discarded will cards intended to be eligible to be shuffled back in, or are they only discarded after you pick the cards? For example, if your Discard Pile contains only 1 card when you use this action, does it end up with 1 card in it (the will card you discarded) or 0?

The similarity of this effect to Anjika Patel's ability, combined with the fact that Bruno stated that Anjika's ability was not intended to allow you to choose the same card that you discarded makes me think that once cannot shuffle back in the discarded will card, but I'm interested to know how others play this.

Going strictly by the rules the cards are first discarded and therefore already in the discard pile when taking the cards to reshuffle.

Anjika's ability is a little different, as you don't just draw a random card from the discard but choose a specific card. And the problem was that this ability could be abused in a way that wasn't intended.

A very similar discussion just came up with Anjika's ability, yes.

In that case, Bruno said that her ability isn't intended to be able to discard a card and then get the same card back -- but he also confirmed that that was how it worked under the rules, that the card you discard to pay the cost is indeed in the discard when you pick cards from the discard, and that it would require errata to fix.

So, in this case, I think it's clear. The will cards are in the discard when you shuffle cards away, and are eligible to be chosen. Anjika will likely be receiving errata because, although unintentional in her case, this is how it works, and in her case it's potentially a balance problem. But you shouldn't read any more into that ruling than that -- cost/benefit clauses are not an exception to the golden rule of "do the things in the order the card says to do them." In fact, they are one of its purest examples.

Contrast with the Restful Sleep advanced skill, which is never included in it's own randomly-choose-from-discard because it isn't discarded until after you randomly choose and shuffle away the cards it heals.

In this case, it is a very minor distinction one way or another. If it's unintentional that the will cards are included in the shuffle, there would be no reason to errata that. It doesn't really make sense to worry about intent (and then potentially complicate the game with special-case rulings) for something like this. The rules say to do things in the order they are written on the card, this ability says discard will cards, then shuffle some cards back, it's simple. No reason to go down a rabbit hole just because they overlooked a combo on Anjika that uses this same golden timing rule -- it probably got overlooked because they're so used to it "just working", they made it all the way to their 11th expansion before it caused it's first "real" problem, after all...

Okay, that makes sense. If it weren't for this recent business about Anjika I wouldn't have even thought twice about it (and indeed was initially playing it as you both suggest), due to the golden rule, but that's now making me question my gut feelings. Thanks for putting me back on track -- I shall play it as written!